One Day You’ll Burn proves that there is originality in the town that has seen it all. Detective Jarsdel is not a hard-boiled copycat who pounds away at both villainy and Scotch but a hip cat who fights LA traffic and sips rosé.
Tag: crime
A Season for the Dead
Hewson never allows the reader to play the guessing game, to try out their Poirot mustache or Holmes pipe. Instead, details are fed at an unusual pace, and are often times repetitive.
The Laundromat
The director almost seems to struggle between wanting to present a relative and convincing documentary yet slides into a goofy and aloof crime caper that is most wanting and where the ninety-five-minute run time is lightest of sentencing.
Finding Steve McQueen
Unusual, ridiculous, honest, fun, Finding Steve McQueen is an entertaining heist flick that successfully steals the time and deserves a happy ending.
Bad Axe County
Bad Axe County by John Galligan is a mid-western sprawl of a tale. The premise is crimes-blues fun. The plot direct and raw. Galligan’s execution is as rough as the harsh mid-western landscape.
The Syndicate
The Pictures was author Guy Bolton’s entry into pure, noir fiction. The read was golden as it was retro. Why then does his follow-up, The Syndicate, lack any of that LA snap? The Pictures was smooth, single-malt brewed to a James Cain beat. As a sequel, The Syndicate is as memorable as that last Coors…
November Road
Beautifully efficient. That is how I described Lou Berney’s writing style to my wife referencing his latest, and allow me to add the hyperbole of masterful, book November Road. Within November Road, Berney fashions the perfect genre mashup. The tale is a first-rate crime story, that’s also a chase story, joined with a love story,…
Debris Line
The thriller Debris Line interchanges the sunny, idyllic life of coastal Portugal, crashing it into a star-spangled actioneer of drugs, hijacking, murder, and oh yes, crimes even more sinister. Matthew FitzSimmons runs his dangerous version of To Catch A Thief by placing his team of semi-retired hackers and military ops at play on vacation and…
Wrecked
Joe Ide opens Wrecked, the latest of his neo-noir IQ series, with the book’s protagonist in a world of trouble. For Isaiah Quintabe, the eponymous hero of Ide’s novels, his world consists of the mean streets of LA. Yet, hot to help a desperate artist track down her long-lost mommy, IQ’s world expands as he…
